A physicist who ignores  physics


A very complacent-looking Isaac Tamblyn

The amusing article below is written by Isaac Tamblyn, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.  So what is his argument for doing something about alleged global warming?  Is it anything from physics?  No.  The authorities he quotes are public opinion polls.  Public opinion poll physics must be a new low in physics

I do not believe that climate change deniers exist. I have heard the statistics and have seen the graphs, but I am not convinced. So I do what the supposed deniers do – I ignore them and move on.

A couple of weeks ago we saw the release of an annual poll on Canadian opinions about climate change and the science around it. Again this year, the numbers reveal that more than half of Canadians think climate change is happening, and is primarily caused by human activity. This has been the majority opinion since tracking began seven years ago.

If the idea of human-driven climate change were running for office, it would win by a landslide. The last time a federal party won more than 50 per cent of the popular vote in this country was 1984. The time before that was 1958. At 63 per cent, the science of climate change has been given a strong mandate by the Canadian public.

Despite this, too many discussions about climate change policy in this country still focus on the existence of the denier camp. There is a misconception that in order to fix climate change, we must first convince everyone that it is happening, and was caused by humans.

Canada is a democracy. In a democracy, decisions are not always made by achieving consensus. Everyone need not agree on an issue in order to take action.

More HERE




New paper finds strong evidence the Sun has controlled climate over the past 11,000 years, not CO2

A paper published today in Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics finds a "strong and stable correlation" between the millennial variations in sunspots and the temperature in Antarctica over the past 11,000 years. In stark contrast, the authors find no strong or stable correlation between temperature and CO2 over that same period.

The authors correlated reconstructed CO2 levels, sunspots, and temperatures from ice-core data from Vostok Antarctica and find:

"We find that the variations of SSN [sunspot number] and T  [temperature] have some common periodicities, such as the 208 year (yr), 521 yr, and ~1000 yr cycles. The correlations between SSN and T are strong for some intermittent periodicities. 

However, the wavelet analysis demonstrates that the relative phase relations between them usually do not hold stable except for the millennium-cycle component. The millennial variation of SSN leads that of T by 30–40 years, and the anti-phase relation between them keeps stable nearly over the whole 11,000 years of the past. As a contrast, the correlations between CO2 and T are neither strong nor stable."

Thus, the well known ~1000 year climate cycle responsible for the Holocene Climate Optimum 6000 to 4000 years ago, the Egyptian warm period ~4000 years ago, the Minoan warm period ~3000 years ago, the Roman warm period ~2000 years ago, the Medieval warm period ~1000 years ago, and the current warm period at present all roughly fall in this same 1000 year sequence of increased solar activity associated with warm periods.

The authors find temperature changes lag solar activity changes by ~40 years, which is likely due to the huge heat capacity and inertia of the oceans. Warming proponents attempt to dismiss the Sun's role in climate change by claiming 20th century solar activity peaked at around 1960 and somewhat declined from 1960 levels to the end of the 20th century (and have continued to decline in the 21st century right along with the 18+ year "pause" of global warming).

Correlation between solar activity and the local temperature of Antarctica during the past 11,000 years

Abstract

By X.H. Zhao & X.S. Feng

"The solar impact on the Earth's climate change is a long topic with intense debates. Based on the reconstructed data of solar sunspot number (SSN), the local temperature in Vostok (T), and the atmospheric CO2 concentration data of Dome Concordia, we investigate the periodicities of solar activity, the atmospheric CO2 and local temperature in the inland Antarctica as well as their correlations during the past 11,000 years before AD 1895. We find that the variations of SSN and T have some common periodicities, such as the 208 year (yr), 521 yr, and ~1000 yr cycles. The correlations between SSN and T are strong for some intermittent periodicities. However, the wavelet analysis demonstrates that the relative phase relations between them usually do not hold stable except for the millennium-cycle component. The millennial variation of SSN leads that of T by 30–40 years, and the anti-phase relation between them keeps stable nearly over the whole 11,000 years of the past. As a contrast, the correlations between CO2 and T are neither strong nor stable. These results indicate that solar activity might have potential influences on the long-term change of Vostok's local climate during the past 11,000 years before modern industry."

Firstly, the assumption that solar activity peaked in 1960 and declined since is false, since it is necessary to determine the accumulated solar energy over multiple solar cycles, which is the accumulated departure from the average number of sunspots over the entire period, which I call the "sunspot integral." The sunspot integral is plotted in blue and shows remarkable correction with global temperatures plotted in red below.

Correlating sunspot and temperature data with and without CO2, we find the sunspot integral explains 95% of temperature change over the past 400 years, and that CO2 had no significant influence

Secondly, this paper finds strong evidence of a 30-40 year lag between solar activity and temperature response. So what happened ~40 years after the 1960 peak in sunspot activity? Why that just so happens to be when satellite measurements of global temperature peaked with the 1998 El Nino [which is also driven by solar activity], followed by the "pause" and cooling since.

We have thus shown:

    Strong correlation between solar activity and climate over the past 11,000 years of the Holocene

    Strong lack of correlation between CO2 and climate over the past 11,000 years of the Holocene

    Solar activity explains all 6 well-known warming periods that have occurred during the Holocene, including the current warm period

    The 20th century peak in sunspot activity is associated with a 40 year lag in the peak global temperature

What more proof do you need that it's the Sun!

SOURCE





Latest IPCC Findings Undermine Climate Change Claims

Working Group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released the final version of its contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. The WG2 report contains 1,731 pages of text, figures, boxes, footnotes and references, the first 832 of which list every negative impact climate change is having or could conceivably have on the Earth, its physical state, its ecosystems and the people who populate it. I doubt that anyone has ever read it from beginning to end. I certainly haven’t.

But the report’s mind-numbing length hasn’t stopped people from interpreting it the way they think it should be interpreted. And because no one bothered to read the fine print everyone thinks the IPCC is saying that the adverse impacts of human-caused climate change are already being felt

But that isn’t what the IPCC is saying. A single sentence on page 4 of the Summary for Policymakers puts the IPCC’s conclusions in a different perspective:

"Attribution of observed impacts in the WGII AR5 generally links responses of natural and human systems to observed climate change, regardless of its cause."

That’s right. Regardless of its cause. Working Group 2 isn’t claiming that these observed impacts are necessarily a result of human activities. They could equally well be the result of natural climate change – the IPCC makes no distinction. And if they are, then President Obama, the New York Times, the Guardian and all the others who believe that the adverse impacts of human-caused climate change are already being felt have got it wrong.

The key question here is clearly what fraction of the observed impacts of climate change that the IPCC identifies is human-caused and how much natural. Let’s see if we can put some probabilities on this.

The Working Group 2 report highlights nine specific claims regarding the physical impacts of climate change in Section A-1 of the Summary for Policymakers (I increased the number to ten by dividing one claim into two.) Three are non-specific, irrelevant or unintelligible and are not discussed:

Claim 1: Glaciers continue to shrink almost worldwide due to climate change.

Evaluation: The world’s glaciers are unquestionably shrinking overall because of climate change. But is the climate change anthropogenic? One way of checking is to compare glacier behavior with an anthropogenic climate change metric to see whether the two coincide, which they should if one caused the other. Such a comparison is shown on the graphic below, which plots the Oerlemans estimates of global glacier length change since 1700 with the GISS estimates of net anthropogenic radiative forcings since 1880 (earlier values can be assumed to be close to zero if not exactly zero):


Oerlemans glacier shrinkage vs. GISS anthropogenic forcings

And the timing doesn’t match. According to Oerlemans the world’s glaciers began to shrink in the early 1800s but according to GISS anthropogenic forcings didn’t become significant until after 1950 (the ~0.2 watts/sq m of forcing in 1950 would have generated only about 0.1C of warming). Oerlemans’ results also show no sign of acceleration in the shrinkage rate after 1960.

These results imply that something other than human interference initiated the glacier shrinkage and that human interference didn’t make any detectable difference when it finally did become significant. (Glaciologists acknowledge that human activities are not the only contributor to glacier shrinkage, as the following quote from Nature attests: “The widespread idea that glacier retreat is the sole consequence of increased air temperature is overly simplistic. Glaciologists have known for more than 50 years that glaciers are sensitive to a variety of climate variables, not all of which can be attributed to global warming.”)

Conclusion: There is good evidence to suggest that much if not substantially all of the glacier shrinkage over the last 200 years was a result of natural climate change.

Much more HERE





Why climate change is good for the world

Matt Ridley

Don't panic! The scientific consensus is that warmer temperatures do more good than harm

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don’t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth.

At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows, for possibly the first time in history, an entire article in the national press on the net benefits of climate change.

There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today — and likely to stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University after he reviewed 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends.

To be precise, Prof Tol calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper). This means approximately 3˚C from pre-industrial levels, since about 0.8˚C of warming has happened in the last 150 years. The latest estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that such temperatures may not be reached till the end of the century — if at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports define the consensis, is sticking to older assumptions, however, which would mean net benefits till about 2080. Either way, it’s a long way off.

Now Prof Tol has a new paper, published as a chapter in a new book, called How Much have Global Problems Cost the World?, which is edited by Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, and was reviewed by a group of leading economists. In this paper he casts his gaze backwards to the last century. He concludes that climate change did indeed raise human and planetary welfare during the 20th century.

You can choose not to believe the studies Prof Tol has collated. Or you can say the net benefit is small (which it is), you can argue that the benefits have accrued more to rich countries than poor countries (which is true) or you can emphasise that after 2080 climate change would probably do net harm to the world (which may also be true). You can even say you do not trust the models involved (though they have proved more reliable than the temperature models). But what you cannot do is deny that this is the current consensus. If you wish to accept the consensus on temperature models, then you should accept the consensus on economic benefit.

Overall, Prof Tol finds that climate change in the past century improved human welfare. By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025. For some people, this means the difference between survival and starvation.

It will still be 1.2 per cent around 2050 and will not turn negative until around 2080. In short, my children will be very old before global warming stops benefiting the world. Note that if the world continues to grow at 3 per cent a year, then the average person will be about nine times as rich in 2080 as she is today. So low-lying Bangladesh will be able to afford the same kind of flood defences that the Dutch have today.

The chief benefits of global warming include: fewer winter deaths; lower energy costs; better agricultural yields; probably fewer droughts; maybe richer biodiversity. It is a little-known fact that winter deaths exceed summer deaths — not just in countries like Britain but also those with very warm summers, including Greece. Both Britain and Greece see mortality rates rise by 18 per cent each winter. Especially cold winters cause a rise in heart failures far greater than the rise in deaths during heatwaves.

Cold, not the heat, is the biggest killer. For the last decade, Brits have been dying from the cold at the average rate of 29,000 excess deaths each winter. Compare this to the heatwave ten years ago, which claimed 15,000 lives in France and just 2,000 in Britain. In the ten years since, there has been no summer death spike at all. Excess winter deaths hit the poor harder than the rich for the obvious reason: they cannot afford heating. And it is not just those at risk who benefit from moderate warming. Global warming has so far cut heating bills more than it has raised cooling bills. If it resumes after its current 17-year hiatus, and if the energy efficiency of our homes improves, then at some point the cost of cooling probably will exceed the cost of heating — probably from about 2035, Prof Tol estimates.

The greatest benefit from climate change comes not from temperature change but from carbon dioxide itself. It is not pollution, but the raw material from which plants make carbohydrates and thence proteins and fats. As it is an extremely rare trace gas in the air — less than 0.04 per cent of the air on average — plants struggle to absorb enough of it. On a windless, sunny day, a field of corn can suck half the carbon dioxide out of the air. Commercial greenhouse operators therefore pump carbon dioxide into their greenhouses to raise plant growth rates.

The increase in average carbon dioxide levels over the past century, from 0.03 per cent to 0.04 per cent of the air, has had a measurable impact on plant growth rates. It is responsible for a startling change in the amount of greenery on the planet. As Dr Ranga Myneni of Boston University has documented, using three decades of satellite data, 31 per cent of the global vegetated area of the planet has become greener and just 3 per cent has become less green. This translates into a 14 per cent increase in productivity of ecosystems and has been observed in all vegetation types.

Dr Randall Donohue and colleagues of the CSIRO Land and Water department in Australia also analysed satellite data and found greening to be clearly attributable in part to the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect. Greening is especially pronounced in dry areas like the Sahel region of Africa, where satellites show a big increase in green vegetation since the 1970s.

It is often argued that global warming will hurt the world’s poorest hardest. What is seldom heard is that the decline of famines in the Sahel in recent years is partly due to more rainfall caused by moderate warming and partly due to more carbon dioxide itself: more greenery for goats to eat means more greenery left over for gazelles, so entire ecosystems have benefited.

Even polar bears are thriving so far, though this is mainly because of the cessation of hunting. None the less, it’s worth noting that the three years with the lowest polar bear cub survival in the western Hudson Bay (1974, 1984 and 1992) were the years when the sea ice was too thick for ringed seals to appear in good numbers in spring. Bears need broken ice.

Well yes, you may argue, but what about all the weather disasters caused by climate change? Entirely mythical — so far. The latest IPCC report is admirably frank about this, reporting ‘no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency offloads on a global scale … low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms’.

In fact, the death rate from droughts, floods and storms has dropped by 98 per cent since the 1920s, according to a careful study by the independent scholar Indur Goklany. Not because weather has become less dangerous but because people have gained better protection as they got richer: witness the remarkable success of cyclone warnings in India last week. That’s the thing about climate change — we will probably pocket the benefits and mitigate at least some of the harm by adapting. For example, experts now agree that malaria will continue its rapid worldwide decline whatever the climate does.

Yet cherry-picking the bad news remains rife. A remarkable example of this was the IPCC’s last report in 2007, which said that global warming would cause ‘hundreds of millions of people [to be] exposed to increased water stress’ under four different scenarios of future warming. It cited a study, which had also counted numbers of people at reduced risk of water stress — and in each case that number was higher. The IPCC simply omitted the positive numbers.

Why does this matter? Even if climate change does produce slightly more welfare for the next 70 years, why take the risk that it will do great harm thereafter? There is one obvious reason: climate policy is already doing harm. Building wind turbines, growing biofuels and substituting wood for coal in power stations — all policies designed explicitly to fight climate change — have had negligible effects on carbon dioxide emissions. But they have driven people into fuel poverty, made industries uncompetitive, driven up food prices, accelerated the destruction of forests, killed rare birds of prey, and divided communities. To name just some of the effects. Mr Goklany estimates that globally nearly 200,000 people are dying every year, because we are turning 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel instead of food: that pushes people into malnutrition and death. In this country, 65 people a day are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly, according to Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster, yet the government is planning to double the cost of electricity to consumers by 2030.

As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, the European Union will pay £165 billion for its current climate policies each and every year for the next 87 years. Britain’s climate policies — subsidising windmills, wood-burners, anaerobic digesters, electric vehicles and all the rest — is due to cost us £1.8 trillion over the course of this century. In exchange for that Brobdingnagian sum, we hope to lower the air temperature by about 0.005˚C — which will be undetectable by normal thermometers. The accepted consensus among economists is that every £100 spent fighting climate change brings £3 of benefit.

So we are doing real harm now to impede a change that will produce net benefits for 70 years. That’s like having radiotherapy because you are feeling too well. I just don’t share the certainty of so many in the green establishment that it’s worth it. It may be, but it may not.

SOURCE





Cost of Adapting to Climate Change May Climb to $500B, Says U.N. Environmental Agency

 As Secretary of State John Kerry and other ministers prepare to join global climate talks in Peru, the U.N.’s environmental agency is claiming that the cost for the planet to “adapt” to global warming could be up to five times higher than previously estimated – a whopping $500 billion a year by mid-century.

A new report by the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP) states that the cost of helping developing nations adapt to rising temperatures “could climb as high as $150 billion by 2025/2030 and $250-500 billion per year by 2050.”

It says those figures could be needed even if greenhouse gas (GHG) emission cuts succeed in restricting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius (3.6°F) above the pre-industrial period average – the goal which world leaders several years ago agreed was necessary to avoid potentially catastrophic effects on the planet.

And if that two degrees Celsius target isn’t achieved, UNEP says, a business-as-usual scenario could see adaptation costs “hit double the worst-case figures.”

Five years ago in Copenhagen, the U.S. and other developed nations agreed on setting up a global fund to help developing countries curb GHG emissions and cope with occurrences attributed to climate change, from drought and floods to rising sea levels.

The subsequently-established Green Climate Fund (GCF) aims to raise $100 billion a year from public and private sources by 2020, an annual commitment already viewed as unrealistic by some critics.

Now UNEP says the actual amount needed could be much higher than that, and that earlier figures – based on 2010 World Bank data – were significantly underestimated.

“The report provides a powerful reminder that the potential cost of inaction carries a real price tag,” UNEP executive director Achim Steiner said on Friday. “Debating the economics of our response to climate change must become more honest. We owe it to ourselves but also to the next generation, as it is they who will have to foot the bill.”

Steiner called on governments and the international community to “take the necessary steps to ensure the funding, technology and knowledge gaps are addressed in future planning and budgeting.”

To date, industrialized countries that are expected to take the lead in providing the money have pledged a total of $9.9 billion for the GCF, less than ten percent of the amount the U.N. says will be needed every year from 2020 onwards. U.S. taxpayers will account for $3 billion of that $9.9 billion total so far.

China’s delegate at the talks in the Peruvian capital Lima complained last week that the amount pledged for the fund to date was “far from adequate.”

China, the world’s biggest GHG emitter and now the world’s largest economy, has pledged nothing.

At the U.N. climate talks in Lima – the 20th round since the first conference in Berlin in 1995 – ministers from almost 200 countries are due to hold a high-level meeting on climate finance on Tuesday afternoon.

Kerry, who is due to join the proceedings, said last week that President Obama’s pledge of $3 billion for the GCF made it clear “that the Obama administration and the United States are all-in on this issue and committed to try to take steps that are long overdue.”

“We intend to continue to try to build momentum moving into next year,” he told reporters in Brussels.

“We believe that not only is there obviously the practical advantage of responding to the events – to the transformation taking place in the climate that is contributing to very severe weather events, to major flooding, major fires, major drought, to shifts in agriculture and other impacts that have huge cost – but we believe it is becoming more and more evident that it is cheaper to invest in the new technologies and move to the clean energy economy,” Kerry said. “And we are going to continue to work for that.”

SOURCE




Australia: Green and Defenceless

As Australia’s industrial capacity declines, Australia is becoming green and defenceless. Australia should give support to industrial diversity, not windmills etc.

History holds lessons.  Back in Dec 1941, Japan suddenly attacked the huge US Naval base at Pearl Harbour. Three days later, two “invincible” British warships, “Repulse” and “Prince of Wales” were sunk by Japanese planes off Malaya. Soon Japanese armies were rampaging through Asia towards Australia. By Feb 1942, the British fortress of Singapore surrendered and Japanese bombs were falling on Darwin. By Sept 1942 the Japanese army had slashed their way down the Kokoda Track and could see the lights of Port Moresby. They were looking across Torres Strait to Australia. At that time, most of our trained soldiers were fighting Rommel in North Africa or in Japanese prison camps.

Suddenly Australia was on its own and needed to defend itself with what we had here.

Armies need soldiers, weapons, bullets, vehicles, fuel, food, alcohol (and cigarettes).

Soldiers volunteered and were conscripted. Australian conscripts formed part of the force that met the Japanese on the Kokoda Track.

Enfield Rifles, Bren Guns and Vickers Machine Guns were produced in large numbers at the Small Arms Factory at Lithgow supported by feeder factories in the area. Britain lost so many weapons at Dunkirk that Australian factories were sending guns to them. We could not do that now.

Motor oil was produced in limited quantities from oil shale at Glen Davis, but petrol was in serious short supply, and had been rationed since 1940. With the fall of Singapore, this shortage became severe, and charcoal burners suddenly appeared to keep cars and trucks moving. Kerosene was scarce so carbide lights were widely used. The demand for charcoal was so great that firewood became scarce so it was also rationed.

To conserve supplies for soldiers, rationing was introduced for tea, clothing, butter, sugar, meat and cigarettes. Hotels were only allowed to serve alcohol twice a day for one hour at a time of their choosing.

An immediate critical shortage was copper for cartridge cases and communications – Australia had mines producing lead, zinc, silver, gold and iron, but there was a critical shortage of copper.

Fortuitously, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, an exploration drill hole at Mount Isa had struck rich copper ore.

Mount Isa was called on to avert a calamitous shortage of copper in Australia. With government encouragement, Mount Isa Mines made the brave decision to suspend the profitable silver/lead/zinc operations and convert all mining and treatment facilities to extracting copper.

The lead concentrator could be converted to treat copper ore, but the biggest problem was how to smelt the copper concentrates. Luckily the company had skilled engineers and metallurgists in the lead smelter. In a miracle of improvisation, scrap steel and spare parts were purchased and scavenged from old mines and smelters from Cloncurry, Mt Elliott, Mt Cuthbert and Kuridala and cobbled into a workable copper smelter.

In 1943 the first Mount Isa blister copper was produced. Production continued after the war when Mount Isa returned to extracting the then more profitable silver/lead/zinc. Later new plant was built enabling both lead and copper metal to be produced from this fabulous mine.

This story of the importance of self-reliance has lessons for today.

The war on carbon energy, the carbon tax, the renewable energy targets, escalating electricity costs and the voices in Parliament calling for Emissions Trading Schemes have all unnerved our big users of carbon fuels and electricity. Smelting and refining have become threatened industries in Australia, and closure of the Mount Isa copper smelter and the Townsville copper refinery has been foreshadowed.

Already six major metal smelting/refining operations have closed in Australia this century and more are likely. The closures have affected copper, lead, zinc, steel and aluminium – the sinews of modern industry. And the car industry, with all its skills and tools, is closing.

More and more land and offshore waters are totally closed to exploration and mining. Offshore exploration for oil is very limited, except in the north-west. On land, there is no exploration in green no-go areas and the “lock-the-gate” rent-a-crowd are trying to prevent gas explorers from drilling even on their own exploration tenements.

Local production and refining of oil is also declining, and it was estimated recently that by next year, half of Australia’s oil refining capacity will have closed. In the event of a disruption to tanker routes, Australia has just 12 days of diesel supplies before city fuel and food supplies start to dry up. Will we see charcoal burners on cars and trucks once again?

Heavy industry is scorned, and is migrating to Asia. We are losing the resources, skills and machinery needed for our own security, while we fritter away precious resources on green energy, direct action, carbon capture and storage and other pointless anti-carbon chimeras.

Our foolish green energy policies and the suicidal war on carbon fuels are killing real industry leaving us unskilled and defenceless – like a fat toothless walrus basking on a sunny beach.

Wake up Australia.

SOURCE

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